Historically, voice-based telephone communications have been handled via dedicated networks, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN), while data communications have been handled via dedicated packet networks, such as Internet protocol (IP) networks. A current trend is to converge these two types of networks, where telephone voice traffic and other forms of real-time media are converted into digital form and carried by a packet data network along with other forms of data. These converged networks may offer many advantages, such as lower operating costs as compared to maintaining separate voice and data networks, greater flexibility regarding service offerings to customers, such as multimedia conferencing, and more efficient use of network resources, such as network hardware and software.
Certain media types are more sensitive to network delays than others. For example, static data such as historical documents and/or still images accessed from a database may be insensitive to transmission delays. In contrast, real-time streaming video and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) data may be very sensitive to transmission delays. Transmission delays may be caused by insufficient bandwidth in network links, signal losses in the transmission path, propagation delays, processing delays, and/or queuing delays. Proliferation of delay-sensitive services, such as VoIP, may require that service providers guarantee customers certain levels of service for delay-sensitive communication data. For example, a service provider may have to guarantee customers a certain bandwidth for performing, for example, VoIP, streaming media and/or video conferencing.
Service providers may use different techniques when trying to provide guaranteed levels of service to customers. For example, service providers may try to monitor data traffic on a network in order to identify delay-sensitive traffic, observe customer traffic as it passes through intermediate network devices, such as a router, and/or make predictions regarding the type of data traffic that will pass through an intermediate network device at a later time. This type of traffic prediction is referred to as a heuristic prediction because an informal, or rule of thumb, future estimate is made by observing a current pattern.
Employing heuristic prediction is computationally intensive because actual data traffic is being monitored and processed substantially on the fly. In addition, heuristic prediction may not be very adaptable and/or accurate because the data used to make future resource allocation decisions has already gone by the router, and subsequent data may not be of the same type and/or pattern as the data that has already traversed the router.